Santorum more realistic than Romney and Paul on jihad

After Rick Santorum’s surprising show in Iowa, he may be the only candidate standing between Mitt Romney and the Republican nomination. But there is no contest between the two as to which demonstrates a more realistic understanding of the threat of jihad and Islamic supremacism. In that arena, Santorum wins hands down.

“Jihadism is evil and we need to say what it is,” Santorum said last March. “We need to define it and say what it is. And it is evil. Sharia law is incompatible with American jurisprudence and our Constitution.” He added correctly, and in sharp contrast to the prevailing view, that “Sharia law is not just a religious code. It is also a governmental code. It happens to be both religious in nature and origin, but it is a civil code. And it is incompatible with the civil code of the United States.”

Even though he made these remarks almost a year ago, as he rises in prominence, Santorum is going to get a lot of heat for this. The Islamic supremacist sympathizers in the mainstream media began calling to these remarks after the Iowa caucus, accusing Santorum of the phantom malady of “Islamophobia.”

One would hope that in response to these accusations Santorum would ask Leftist reporters (and Ron Paul, who recently accused him of “hating Muslims”) if they think that Sharia provisions such as the death penalty for apostates, stoning for adultery, amputation of the hand for theft, the denial of freedom of speech and institutionalized second-class status for women and non-Muslims are not evil.

If Santorum did that, it is likely that the media would then highlight some smooth Islamic supremacist deceiver who would claim that those things are not part of Sharia; however, there is not a single Muslim country that has ever implemented Sharia without implementing those measures, or one school of Islamic jurisprudence that does not teach such things. So Rick Santorum is on firm ground.

Mitt Romney, by contrast, is sinking into the quicksand of politically correct half-truths and untruths about Islam and jihad. Recently he claimed that violent Islamic jihadists “take a very different view of Islam than the Muslims I know.” He said that the Muslims he knew in Detroit were “peace-loving and America-loving individuals. I believe that very sincerely. I believe people of the Islamic faith do not have to subscribe to the idea of radical, violent jihadism.” Romney has even gone so far as to claim that “there is, however, a movement in the world known as jihadism” that is “by no means a branch of Islam. It is instead an entirely different entity. In no way do I suggest it is a part of Islam.”

This is tantamount to saying that the local post office is by no means a branch of the U.S. Postal Service, or that golf has nothing to do with the country-club left-leaning Republicanism that Romney represents.

But even Romney has a clearer view of the jihad problem than Ron Paul, who has recently claimed that the September 11 attacks happened because of “flawed” U.S. policies — not, in other words, because of the Islamic jihad imperative that the 9/11 hijackers themselves invoked as their primary motivation in writings they left behind. He has also claimed that the Iran nuclear threat has been “blown out of proportion.” His anxiety to avoid involving the U.S. in another foredoomed and quixotic adventure in nation-building like those in Afghanistan and Iraq is laudable, but to dismiss so casually the possibility of a cataclysm that could destroy Israel altogether and murder millions of people in the Middle East is irresponsible, to say the least.

None of the Republican candidates has a complete understanding of the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, but all of them, with the notable exception of Ron Paul, would be an improvement over Barack Obama, whose policies have seen an Islamic supremacist advance in the “Arab Spring” countries that bodes extremely ill for the U.S. in the long run. There is no chance that Sharia states based on Islamic law will remain for long favorably disposed in any meaningful sense to the world’s foremost infidel polity. “In any meaningful sense” — that is, as opposed to the deceptive sham alliances of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Free people may hope that whoever does ultimately get the nomination will get a crash course in the truth about jihad, and restore it to our intelligence and law enforcement agencies. If he doesn’t, it will be another very long four years.